Especially around the St. Louis metro area. Then, after all the media coverage about Ferguson, a friend told me about the settlement patterns and the part of Missouri known as "Little Dixie".
"Little Dixie is a 13- to 17-county region of mid-to-upper-mid Missouri found along the Missouri River, settled primarily by migrants from the hemp and tobacco districts of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. Because Southerners settled there first, the pre-Civil War culture was similar to that of the Upper South. The area was known as Boonslick country.[citation needed] When the Southerners resettled in Missouri, they brought their cultural, social, agricultural, architectural, political and economic practices, including slavery. On average Missouris slave population was only 10 percent, but in Little Dixie, county and township slave populations ranged from 20 to 50 percent by 1860, with the highest percentages for counties that had large plantations along the river."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Dixie_(Missouri)
Yeah, its a long time ago, but racial attitudes are one of the things that seems to span generations, effecting behavioral patterns -- apparently such as policing -- thru the decades.